Reduction to a singleton

The New York Times (thanks for the link to Eric Metaxes) has an article out this morning on women who choose to exterminate one or more of their children in utero to be left with only one child. Imagine a young man who worked hard for years, saving his money, until he had enough money not just to buy a car but to buy two cars. Excited he runs out and buys two brand new Mustangs, one red and one yellow. He drives them out to a scenic overlook, stands looking at them admiringly and then puts one brand new car into neutral and shoves it off the cliff before driving home in the other. That is crazy, right? Not any more so than paying some fertility specialist a vast sum of money to impregnate you because you are desperate for children and then paying someone to kill some of those children so you have a more manageable number.

The chilling euphemisms used in the article, The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy is testimony to the disregard for life in our culture...

This secrecy is common among women undergoing reduction to a singleton.

A "singleton" is the survivor, chosen by his or her mother, the child who fulfilled the acceptable number "1" rather than "more than 1". "Undergoing a reduction" is code for killing off the unwanted children that you spent a ton of money and effort to conceive.The abortion industry has expended a great deal of effort to change the terms of the discussion to make it more palatable. "Reduction" instead of abortion or killing, "singleton" instead of survivor.

There is a lot going on here. The reduction of the blessing of a child to something to be manipulated by science into something never intended. The results of a culture that tells young women to wait to get married, wait to have children (not wait to have sex of course, that is just silly!) until they are "ready", as if anyone is ever "ready" to be a parent and then when they finally decide to have children the biological reality has set in and they find themselves unable to conceive. We see the ethically dangerous question of what a woman who is infertile should do. We also see the way that people can explain things away to cover their shame. Read this from "Jenny" (I assume that is a pseudonym):

“Things would have been different if we were 15 years younger or if we hadn’t had children already or if we were more financially secure,” she said later. “If I had conceived these twins naturally, I wouldn’t have reduced this pregnancy, because you feel like if there’s a natural order, then you don’t want to disturb it. But we created this child in such an artificial manner — in a test tube, choosing an egg donor, having the embryo placed in me — and somehow, making a decision about how many to carry seemed to be just another choice. The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control.”

There is so much to unpack in those words.My heart aches for the women who have been sold a lie in our culture, a lie that sees a job in an office or cubicle as "success" and a child as a burden to be controlled, avoided or "reduced". Satan is the Father of Lies and nowhere is His lie more pronounced than in this. God says children are a blessing and that old serpent still says "Has God really said...". Even the so called "ethics" that surround this are terrible:

Mark Evans, an obstetrician and geneticist, was among the first to reduce a pregnancy. He quickly became one of the procedure’s most visible and busiest practitioners, as well as one of the most prolific authors on the topic. Early on, Evans decided the industry needed guidelines, and in 1988, he and an ethicist with the National Institutes of Health issued them. One of their central tenets was that most reductions below twins violated ethical principles.

So killing one child to reduce the number to two is perfectly ethical but killing two to bring the number down to a "singleton" is not? How macabre, how ghastly! We may not leave our newborn children out to die from exposure but under the neat and tidy medical clinics we are every bit as barbaric. Since the method described to "reduce" a child: involves a fatal injection of potassium chloride into the fetal chest. The dead fetus shrivels over time and remains in the womb until delivery. , I think it is a bit late to be talking about "ethics" here.

We live in a world gone completely insane but we congratulate ourselves for how progressive we are. Other than the cross there is no greater sign of the forbearance, patience and mercy of God than the fact that He does not bring down His wrath on this world right now. The need for Christians to raise our children to think about things differently, Biblically has never been more urgent. Sons that embrace marriage and fatherhood, daughters that embrace home and motherhood, is one of the greatest witnesses we can provide to a world full of people who are yearning for something other than the lie they have been fed by our culture, media and educational system. We need to be a witness to the preciousness of human life, lives that we precious enough for God to send His only begotten Son to redeem, lives too precious to be "reduced".

One final quote from "ethicist" Mark Evans (I refuse to call him "doctor"):

“Ethics,” he said, “evolve with technology.”

Actually no it doesn't. We have just gotten more clinical in our descriptions of murder. That isn't progress.